Dancing Near the Stars

Little more than a year ago, Mike "the Situation" Sorrentino was just another knucklehead partying away his summer on the Jersey Shore whose biggest priorities were GTL (that's gym, tan, and laundry). And of course smushing. Lots of smushing. Now he's walking red carpets, selling vitamin supplements, and taking meetings in Hollywood. Can anything stop him and his $5 million abs?

The situation with the Situation is as follows:

For the past few weeks, the Situation and his retinue have been staying in Los Angeles, in a furnished apartment across the street from an open-air mall. The stucco exterior of the apartment complex is a rich tanning-bed tangerine-brown. (This is probably a coincidence.)

The Situation is in town to compete on ABC's Dancing with the Stars, a deeply weird and massively popular television show in which public figures of varying renown pair up with chipper, long-suffering choreographer-instructors to perform ballroom-dancing routines in costumes of varying spangliness while a cruise-ship-style band cheerfully declaws the popular songs of the day. The American people vote for their favorite couple each week via phone or text; at the end, somebody wins a trophy.

For eleven seasons, Dancing with the Stars has been a magnet for inveterate spotlight-hounds (Wayne Newton) and egomaniacal competition-aholics (Mark Cuban). But a lot of public figures do it because they've lost access to the platform that made them public figures. They're former sitcom stars, retired athletes, between-hits musicians, or (once, memorably) disgraced ex–majority leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives, and dancing the fox-trot and the cha-cha on national TV represents an opportunity to (a) get back out in front of an audience, and (b) reveal themselves to that audience as multitalented, multifaceted (or just talented and faceted, depending), and eager to leave it all on the floor in an attempt to entertain you, the home viewer. It's a two-nights-a-week pageant of neediness that literalizes the trained-seal aspect of famousness and routinely brings in around 17 million viewers, even when Monday Night Football is on.

The difference, with the Situation, is that he still has a platform: Up until five days before DWTS premiered, he was in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, taping the third season of Jersey Shore, the MTV reality show that made him and his laser-chiseled abdominal muscles—which, in a masterstroke of personal-brand integration, are also called "the Situation"—sort of famous. But the Situation would not be the Situation today if he were willing to settle for being "sort of" anything. Reality got him this far, but DWTS is his chance to level up. To reach the kind of people who watch Desperate Housewives. People who know him, if they know him at all, know him as some kind of vague mediascape pest, lurking Tila Tequila-like on the fringe of their awareness. People who would ordinarily be unwilling to have foisted upon them as a household name the guy from a reality show about self-proclaimed "guidos" and "guidettes" whose principal interests include drinking, tanning, sport-fucking, ultratrashy violence, and house music.

In other words, the Situation wants to introduce himself to your mom, and maybe your grandmother, too. And he wants them to see him as a good guy—sweet and humble, and grateful for the opportunities he's been presented, and totally dedicated to the job of being a famous person.

Like most reality-TV people, the Situation believes that being filmed twenty-four hours a day by a reality-TV crew failed to fully capture his nuances and complexities; we will see a less cocky, more humble Situation on Dancing with the Stars, he says. The Situation believes that this softer Situation is something people will want to see, because if the Situation believes in anything, he believes in the Situation.

"I always had dreams," he says, "my whole life, of being somebody special. Someone out in the world that everybody knew of and everybody liked. Somebody unique. Even when I was down on my luck, in my head I still had those dreams. Sometimes in people's lives, when bad stuff happens, their dreams just die, and they end up settling. I guess that's their decision, maybe, because they didn't believe in their dreams or forgot their dreams. My dreams never died."

···

Up in his apartment, the Situation rises around 11:30 a.m., emerges from his bedroom sleep-clammy, clamps his light blue Yankees cap on backward, over the shooting star shaved into the side of his peanut-shaped head, bends down over the kitchen stove to spark the first of the countless Marlboro Lights with which he'll punctuate the day, and launches, unprompted, into a digressive, stem-winding stream-of-consciousness rap about what he's up to right this minute, jumping from topic to topic as if he's expecting a reality-TV editor to organize his thoughts in post.

The gist: At every turn, since Jersey Shore happened, people have warned him that none of this will last, and at every turn these people have been proved wrong. As soon as the show started airing and delivering some of MTV's best ratings in years, the Situation says, "things went fairy-tale."

In this fairy tale, a former mortgage broker named Mike Sorrentino, born in 1981 on the Fourth of July, hits a personal low—unemployed after the collapse of the housing market, abandoned by the girlfriend he had planned to marry, back living in his father's house on Staten Island, at the age of 25. He has vague unfulfilled dreams of being an entertainer, but so far the closest he's come has been a job as a shirtless waiter in a strip club. (He says he wasn't an actual stripper, then admits he did it once, wearing "like, a red-white-and-blue thong and maybe, like, an Uncle Sam hat." He quit the gig after a few months: "I didn't mind the attention from pretty girls. But then if I got attention from unattractive girls, it just felt kind of cheap." Logic!)

And yet he dreams, still, of walking into a room with his fist held high, like Rocky, while people scream. He pictures this when he works out, to drive himself harder. All he has in the world is this vision—this vision, and his abs. They do not yet have a name, but people tell him they're ridiculous. People tell him that they have an incredible structure to them, these abs. They tell him they've never seen abs like that.

So he bets on these abs. He sends pictures—Polaroids of himself, in his underwear, taken by an ex-girlfriend—to a couple of New York modeling agencies. He lands a modeling contract—fitness and underwear. He and a couple of buddies go out to celebrate. He's just come from a go-see, he's looking his best—"dried out and very lean," he remembers. They're at a beach bar in Jersey. He's shirtless. He walks by a girl. She's holding her boyfriend's hand, but when she sees him she can't help herself. She says, Oh, my God, honey. She says, Look at his abs. This breaks his buddies up. They say, Oh man, Mike. That's a situation, man—because you don't do that when you're strolling with your boyfriend. And Mike starts laughing. Mike says, "Nah, man—that's the situation," and points to his abs.

Lightning strikes. Fireworks pop. Oontz-oontz house music explodes on the soundtrack. Headlines spin toward the camera in montage. All the greats have a moment like this. It's the bat flying through Bruce Wayne's window. It's Eddie Adams from Torrance christening himself Dirk Diggler. Watson, come here—check out how ripped I am. Two weeks later, on his birthday, he goes to a casting call for what, at the time, is going to be a VH1 reality show about the leisure-time activities of young people from the Garden State, and he gets a callback, instantly, and in the subsequent tell-me-about-yourself interview, the TV-show people ask him if he has any nicknames.

He thinks, Should I say it? He wonders if it sounds right. Maybe he should say something else. Maybe he's "Mike Abs." He says to the TV-show people, "Do you really want me to say it?" And the TV people lean forward, they say yes, they do, and Mike says, "You know what? I'm the Situation."

The TV people flip out. They say this is the greatest thing they've ever heard.

They shoot some stuff. It's a rough draft. Many of the things that will make Jersey ShoreJersey Shore are not yet in place—the cast living together in a share house; working some summertime-blues drag of a job; Snooki. There's no Snooki because there's a whole different cast, apart from the Situation, who ends up being the only person asked back months later when a producer named SallyAnn Salsano, whose previous credits include A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila and Tool Academy, takes over the project, reboots the casting process—turning the original Jersey Shore kids into fist-pumping Pete Bests, left to wonder why they missed out on being in the guido Beatles—and creates the Jersey Shore that becomes a cultural phenomenon, which is the kind of turn of events that makes you believe in destiny, if, like the Situation, you think of yourself as a "destiny dude."

Jersey Shore becomes infamous before it becomes famous. In the first season, the Situation's housemate Snooki—born Nicole Polizzi, an irrepressible orange-skinned Gidget in search of a beach-party movie—gets punched in the face at a bar by a 24-year-old gym teacher. Feminists accuse MTV of promoting violence against women as entertainment, and when the episode airs, MTV cuts to black before the punch, like it's 9/11 footage. The incident feeds a larger flap about the show's depiction of Italian-American culture—at least at first, Jersey Shore is promoted as an anthropological study of a world we're encouraged to view as tacky, and while many of the people in the cast aren't full-blooded Italian-Americans or New Jerseyites, they all self-identify as "guidos," which means they're sort of spiritually Italian and spiritually Jersey, and Italian-American organizations object so vehemently to the way the show depicts them, you'd think MTV had decided to air "The Sacco and Vanzetti We Rob-a da Bank Variety Hour." Advertisers defect, including the stalwart defenders of Italian-American tradition at Domino's Pizza.

There's a fundamentally generation-gappish tone to the whole controversy. The first Italian-American group to call for Jersey Shore's cancellation is UNICO National, founded way back in 1922 to further the image of Italian-Americans as community-spirited patriots whose loyalties lie with the United States, not their former homeland; on some level the whole thing was really about the children of immigrant strivers decrying MTV for exposing the way the grandchildren of immigrant strivers take their freedom for granted by acting like total jerk-offs, which is basically the story of American youth culture. UNICO expressing agita over Jersey Shore was no different from Bill Cosby grumbling about hip-hop or Barack Obama exhorting African-American youth to pull up their damn pants.

In fairness, though, there was something a little bit Animal Planet about Jersey Shore in the beginning. The Situation says it was described to him, during casting, as "The Hills for New York and New Jersey, what the cool kids in New York and New Jersey do," and it probably was, but that's bullshit. The Hills was an aspirational, semiscripted soap opera about beautiful teenagers eating brunch on sun-kissed patios before moving on to dream careers in fashion design and event planning. Jersey Shore explicitly exoticized the world it depicted, highlighting its cast's earring-ripping catfights, their cavalier hookups, their gaudy Gothic-lettered T-shirts, their rampant hair-gel abuse, and their shitty taste in dance music; they even treated half the footage with an old-timey-newsreel filter that made the show resemble a snuff film.

Then something weird happened: America got to know these kids, and America grew to love them a little. "Pauly D" DelVecchio, the DJ with the bombproof Gotti Boys tape-up, turned out to be hilariously funny; Jenni "JWOWW" Farley turned out to be a gruff den mother with a heart as big as her implants; Snooki turned out to be a goddamn national treasure.

Sure, they all got shithouse drunk and screamed bleeped curse words in one another's faces and flashed their thongs and referred to girls who didn't meet their rigorous physical-attractiveness standards as "grenades" and generally embodied every negative stereotype associated with Italian-American culture you can embody without murdering someone for control of a gambling syndicate. But they never seemed less than totally genuine, something you can't say about the last ten years of Real World fuckbots, and they lived, for the most part, by a bro code, and they kept each other in line, and they always said grace at dinner. They were less like the Sopranos and more like the Simpsons—irascible cartoons with skin tones not found in nature, accused of contributing to the decline of family values while actually reaffirming those values. And over the course of two seasons, they've grown into the most charismatic characters on TV.

It was hard to imagine MTV not finding a way to ruin it; when it was announced that season two would shoot in tony, Kardashian-y Miami, a lot of people figured that the cast would leave their innocence back in Seaside Heights. Instead, they were even more themselves. Angelina Pivarnick, who left the show in season one under a cloud of "reality"-meets-reality drama involving her boyfriend, a married police officer, came back in a crucial straw-that-stirs-the-Sex-on-the-Beach house-bitch role. JWOWW and Snooki hatched a cockamamie plan to expose Ronnie's infidelity to long-suffering Sammi via anonymous letter, a plotline that ended up playing itself out over the course of three tension-packed episodes. And the Situation was filmed eating a sandwich while watching Pauly D have sex. All of it was amazing television; only the fact that it wasn't, y'know, written kept it from being the best-written show of the year.

The cast held up MTV for more money between seasons one and two; the Situation was reportedly the first one to settle, after MTV agreed to pay him $10,000 per episode. In July, the New York Post reported that he, Farley, DelVecchio, and Snooki will make $30,000 per show for season three; that same month, TMZ .com obtained a leaked MTV memo offering the Situation a ratings-based bonus of up to $180,000. (Jersey Shore remains a runaway hit for MTV—the September 30 episode earned a 3.4 rating among adults between 18 and 49, beating out the 10 p.m. offerings on all four broadcast networks.)

They will presumably ask for more next time, for eff-you money, for Seinfeld money, and they will most likely get it, because by now everyone involved on both sides has to know you can't just grow another Situation or Snooki in a lab.

And while most of the housemates have typical pseudo-celebritous side hustles going—Pauly D spins at the Palms in Las Vegas, and JWOWW has a clothing line, Filthy Couture, and a licensing deal with a tanning-lotion company—nobody has worked harder to monetize their post– Jersey Shore infamy than the Situation.

"Before the show even came out, man," Marc Sorrentino, the Situation's older brother and business manager, tells me, "he told everybody-"

"I thought it would do well," Marc says, "but you can't predict this type of success. I don't think Bill Gates thought that Microsoft was going to be a worldwide conglomerate. But Mike was dead-on. He was like, 'Yo, I killed it. This is going to be crazy.'"

He started trademarking his catchphrases immediately, with an eye toward merchandising. His portfolio does not include "the Situation"—somebody beat him to that. But he does own "GTL," which began on the show as shorthand for "gym, tan, laundry," his daily routine, but has become a kind of all-purpose mantra for the Situation lifestyle, to the point that when the Situation met Leonardo DiCaprio at a club not long ago, the first thing DiCaprio said to him was "GTL all day, baby."

He's got applications in for "Fresh to Death," "Grenade Free Foundation," and "Sitch." He owns "Situation Nation." He owns "If hating is your occupation, I got a full-time job for you." That last one, the Situation says, is DiCaprio's favorite.

His asking price for a personal appearance at a club—he sits in a booth, people freak out—is $10,000. "I used to pay $10 to get in," he says. "Now I get $10,000 to come. It's funny how quick it goes from 'Five grand, that's so sick' to that being shit money. Five grand's shitty money now. It's like, 'Seriously?'"

He's appeared in online promotional videos for Reebok and Vitaminwater. He's the face, and the abs, of Nox Edge, the world's first chewable preworkout supplement, and Devotion, the world's first protein-infused vodka. His first attempt at multimedia crossover—a clumsy club-banger called "The Situation," which featured Fatman Scoop and a crapload of AutoTune—did not set the world on fire. But his iPhone app sold like crazy. And even though it's hard to imagine anyone actually reading his forthcoming self-help-book-autobiography, Here's the Situation, there's no way it won't be the greatest audiobook since Kenny Powers's You're Fucking Out. The only endorsement deal he can remember turning down is a line of Situation condoms. They had a great tagline—"Protect your situation, in every situation"—but he worried about his young fans getting the wrong idea, possibly while jacked up on protein vodka and Nox Edge's "proprietary creatine blend."

In August a source quoted in The Hollywood Reporter said he stood to make $5 million in 2010; Marc and the Situation don't dispute that number, but they say they're putting most of it back into the business. The Situation is a corporation now—MPS Entertainment, LLC.

"I understand that there's going to be a shelf life for Jersey Shore," he says. "What I'm trying to do is build a castle, so that when that shelf life falls off, I'll be able to move forward in this field in an efficient and positive way. We're fortunate enough that the business is a multimillion-dollar enterprise, but we would like to make it grow. At the end of next year, I want it to be a billion-dollar brand."

···

"Losing is not a- wait, let me do it over. Losing is not an option for me."

The Situation's back at his apartment, taping interview segments that will be blended into this week's episode. He's sitting in the living room area of a model apartment that the ­building keeps to show prospective renters. The DWTS production team—they're the ones putting the Situation up in this place, along with other season-eleven contestants like Bristol Palin—has commandeered it for the day. A microphone shaped like a Colt .45 hangs over his head, just outside the frame. There's a three-person crew, all internishly young. Ryan, hair cropped close like a hipster priest, faces the Situation in a chair, asks him questions, and feeds his answers back to him as sound bites.

It should be easy, but the Situation's fading. He's hungry. We took a little too long leaving the Situation's apartment earlier—he had to find his rosary necklace, his styptic pencil, his spiking gel. Then we got in a rented black Escalade and drove to a healthy-chicken joint on Melrose Avenue while the Situation told me about his next reality-TV project, a show that will be called either Situation Inc. or A Family Situation and will follow the Situation (along with the rest of the crew, including the Situation's childhood friend Jonny Manfre, who goes by "the Unit" or "the Inception"—"because I'm in girls' dreams"—and is supposedly the only person to whom the Situation has imparted his ab-definition secrets) to business meetings, rehearsals, and personal appearances: "All the Entourage-y stuff that we do," the Situation said.

The restaurant turned out to be packed; the Situation took one look and suggested that we go find a Cheesecake Factory. Then he and Marc and Jonny Manfre charged back across Melrose to the car, striding boldly into traffic the way you don't do in L.A. unless you think you're indestructible. "We're not from around here," the Situation said with a grin. It was pretty Entourage-y.

We never found that Cheesecake Factory. We missed the lunch window. Every minute of the Situation's day is double-booked. So now he's up in this apartment, trying his best to be a gracious pseudocelebrity.

Ryan asks the Situation to name some competitive activities he's been involved in. The Situation rattles it off—martial arts from 6 to 16, football and baseball. "I've competed my whole life," he says. "Okay, great, let's do that," Ryan says. "'I've been competitive since day one...'"

"I've been competitive since day one," the Situation repeats, then recites the list again. You can see him tensing up, trying to give the cameras what they want; his answers get less focused the harder he tries.

"Great bite," Ryan says after every take, like he's impressed. He tries to elicit some friendly smack-talk about the other contestants. The Situation hesitates. Ryan tells him that everybody's doing it, reads him something Kurt Warner said about last week's winner, Jennifer Grey:

"'I know you're on top,'" he says, "'but I'm ready to put you back in the corner.'"

In the back of the room, a sound technician says "Jesus" derisively, goes back to reading a thick book about terrorism. The Situation furrows his brow, says, "I never trash-talk or talk smack."

He tries one out—"Jennifer Grey used to dirty dance, but I'm sure you know what I used to do"—and everybody loves it, but the Situation decides not to say it for the cameras. "Because everyone's saying I was a stripper when I was younger," he explains.

Moving on. Ryan asks the Situation some questions about how hard he's practicing.

"All I do is dance, eat, and go to sleep," the Situation says. "That's all I do."

Ryan loves this. "Dance, eat, sleep. D-E-S. That's your new thing now," he says, "Dance, eat, sleep. 'I used to be GTL, now I'm DES.' " The Situation laughs, says, "DES—dance, eat, sleep" to himself, swishes water, then says, "You know what? I used to be GTL, but now all I do is DES—dance, eat, sleep!"

"Do you have a motto in competition?" Ryan asks.

"Um, for competition," the Situation says, "I'll do anything to win. For this competition, if I need to change my hair or my outfit, or try different moves—I'm very daring. I understand that it's possible that I won't pull it off. But I'll try."

The Situation has a meeting at a movie studio—I've agreed not to say which one—at three o'clock. We're in a rented gold Mustang convertible. The Situation's manager, Mike Petolino, is driving. We're elbowing our way through afternoon traffic on La Cienega. On the radio, Eminem gives way to a celebrity-dirt break with gossip imp Perez Hilton, who talks, coincidentally enough, about intra-Guidette acrimony in the Jersey Shore house during the filming of season three, occasioned by the arrival of new cast member Deena Nicole.

"Deena and Snooki used to be BFFs," Perez says, "but now that Deena's been spending a lot of time with Sammi, Snooki's not very happy about that.

Mike snorts knowingly, if you can conceive of what that sounds like, and says, "Imagine that."

The Situation doesn't react. He's poking at his iPad like a kid with an Etch A Sketch. He takes his iPad everywhere with him, cranks aggressive rap songs by Waka Flocka Flame when he walks in and out of places, like it's a ghetto blaster. Theme music.

"And if you were able to understand what I just said," Perez says, "you watch too much Jersey Shore. GTL, baby!"

We ease onto the 10 freeway. The Situation puts his feet up on the dashboard. There is star-shaped bling—part of a Situation-endorsed shoe-jewelry line, Luxury Laces—on the eyelets of his toothpaste-white sneakers. He tells me more about Situation Inc., says he likes the idea of turning his team into stars; he sees it as a way to give them a little credit for their role in his success. But he's not sure they're ready for what's going to happen to them once they're on TV.

"I told Jonny, I said, 'Listen, man, you're going to get a little taste of the limelight, but it's not as easy as it looks,'" he says. "The scrutiny. And the microscope. Obviously it's a blessing—the women and the money and the fame, but at the same time it's—it's actually very lonely. Very lonely."

It's interesting that "lonely" is the adjective you go to, I say.

"When you're doing so well, when you have the year that I had," the Situation says, "it's hard to talk to people about it, because they think you're being cocky. Plus, when it comes to women, y'know, obviously, they're throwing themselves at you—but for what reasons, you know what I mean?"

Totally! Did having a camera crew following you around all the time make it easier to get girls or harder? "There's certain women you can tell right off the bat don't care," the Situation says. "They just want to get the limelight. You can see that from a mile away. And there's other girls that immediately shy away, like, 'I don't want to be on-camera.' And then there's the middle-of-the-road girls that will come over to you, but they're like, 'Yo, I can't do this on-camera, because my mom will kill me.'"

During the first season, the idea that you couldn't close the deal with any of the girls at the club was a running subplot, I say. Is that why? Did the cameras scare them off?

"Well," the Situation says, clearly taking exception, "if you saw the [season-one reunion] special, I hooked up with, like, forty girls that summer. But it's not easy or comfortable, knowing that people are watching you have sex. Even though you're under the covers—it's still uncomfortable. And it's uncomfortable for the girl. You have to be so on point with your game to even get with a girl on-camera, let alone have sex."

This is one of the great mysteries of Jersey Shore: It's hard to imagine any woman who's seen the show—in which every grunt and comforter-wiggle of every hookup is captured by an unblinking ceiling-mounted night-vision camera, not to mention discussed by everyone in the house the next day—wanting to smush with any of these dudes. Particularly the Situation, who comes off, it has to be said, as kind of a pig when it comes to women—pulling Night at the Roury personal-space-invader moves at the club, rushing his conquests into taxicabs once the deed is done, and living up to every cliché about the Italian-American male and the virgin-whore complex by regularly calling boyfriend-juggling roommate Angelina a slut while simultaneously trying to sleep with everything on two heels.

And yet he gets results. Girls come home with him from the club; they answer his booty calls. It's like watching the Fonz work.

I ask if it's ever possible to ditch the crew for a private hookup.

"It's very hard," the Situation says. "I tried to get away from them at times, but they catch up with you. They got PAs chasing you. They have to keep a special eye on me, because they know I'm pretty slick. They'll put an extra two people on me, or they'll put the fastest person on me. And also, y'know, they have high expectations for me, as well."

I have to keep pushing him to talk about Jersey Shore; he's clearly reluctant to share this moment with his castmates. When he does discuss the show, though, he's quick to characterize his role as paterfamilial.

"I felt like I was doing a little bit of the structuring, as per what we were doing and how we were doing it," he says. "I put

a lot of effort into that show."

He cooked Sunday dinners, he says, because it brought the cast closer together and gave them an opportunity to get their issues out in the open—and when this didn't happen naturally, he saw it as his job to help the process along. "If somebody's arguing, it's negative energy in the house. So I'm trying to get that fight over with, make up, and move on. Sometimes that came across as instigation, but I didn't mind being that villain, because I was confident enough to stand by myself if nobody liked me. I didn't think some of the others could do that. You gotta be that villain sometimes. People love me and I'm that villain; they hated me, but they all watched."

Toward the end of the second season, particularly after Angelina re-quit the show, you could see the Situation starting to embrace that villain role and the screen time that came with it. He makes this shift in his relationship to his housemates sound deliberate, as if he perceived a need for a post-Angelina antagonist and filled it, like a WWF wrestler turning heel, but he also talks about Jersey Shore like it's his old job. At no point during our day together does he mention any of his castmates by name.

···

The Situation asks Mike if we're going to stop for food on the way to the meeting. Mike tells him we're already late, and the guy we're meeting is going to leave if we don't make it there.

He starts rummaging in the compartment between the front seats, looking for something to eat.

"I just got a car," he says, either because he wants to change the subject or because he's forgotten what we were talking about.

I read about this, I say. The Bentley. You bought a gently used Bentley. That seems like the most fiscally responsible way to buy yourself a Bentley.

"Yeah," he says, "It has 'THE SITUATION' in chrome on the back. I wanted something that would remind me that I did something special this year. It's beautiful, unbelievable, expensive—almost like something you don't even drive. I haven't even shipped it out here. Because I want to win [Dancing with the Stars], but I understand that I possibly could lose, so what if I ship it out here, boom, and then I gotta bounce, y'know? Hey—we got Gummi Bears!"

He holds the bag up. The heat has fused the Gummi Bears into a single rainbow-colored mass. "Great," the Situation says.

"Food after this," Mike says to the Situation. "I promise."

A few minutes later, we're in the producer's office. Mike and the Situation sit on the couch; the producer swivels in his desk chair. The producer's in his late thirties, wearing corduroys, Converse slip-ons, and a green polo shirt. He tells the Situation that his wife got obsessed with Jersey Shore first and then got him obsessed with it. He tells the Situation a little bit about the kind of movies they make here. He asks the Situation what he's looking to do in this business.

"Not just to be in TV and film, but to be awesome in TV and film," the Situation says. He talks about how the Rock started out in projects tailored to him and then moved into other stuff.

"Comedy, action—that's me all the way, bro," the Situation says. "I can do comedy. I could do, like, a bad guy. Or something with women. I can be charming. But I can also get my body in really incredible shape for action, like a G.I. Joe dude."

At the beginning, I'm convinced this is just a social call—that the producer just wanted this meeting so he could tell his wife he met the Situation. They've had a few meetings like that, Mike tells me later. But apparently it isn't; by the time the meeting's over, the producer has offered the Situation a small part in the movie adaptation of a recent nonfiction best seller—again, I can't tell you what it is, but it's an opportunity for the Situation to play a Situation-type guy without actually playing the Situation—if they can make it work around his Jersey Shore shooting schedule.

"You definitely have a star quality," the producer says, and the Situation beams, and everything goes a little more fairy-tale.

···

So here's something: The Situation can't dance. Like, at all. He's learning the steps, but every time you see him hit that Dancing with the Stars stage, he mostly looks like he's trying very hard not to fist-pump. At the end of the first episode—which, granted, he only had five days to rehearse for—he found himself in a three-way tie for last with David Hasselhoff and Margaret Cho. "There is a spark there somewhere," said judge Bruno Tonioli, who turns every critique into a bombastic Roberto Benigni–esque outburst. "A very, very faint thing that may or may not be talent. Only time will tell."

The other problem, right now, is that the Situation and Karina Smirnoff, his dance partner–mentor, aren't getting along, exactly. Things came to a head the other night.

"Two hot personalities, y'know," Mike Petolino says, as we're speeding to the rehearsal studio. "It's not his fault. It was late at night, two people bumping heads, different ways of getting things done."

You can see how the problem developed. The Situation is overscheduled and more than a little bit ADD, and as bad as he wants this, his dancing needs more work than he's got time to do. Plus, he doesn't seem like somebody who deals with a lot of women who aren't potential smush objects or members of his immediate family; being bossed around the studio by a woman probably takes some getting used to.

"The problem," Karina tells me, "is that he can't handle a strong Russian woman. He wants me to follow him everywhere."

She's tiny, in a beaded snood, loose striped T-shirt, Ed Hardy sweats. She's limbering up while a camera crew from Entertainment Tonight prepares to tape a backstage-with-the-Situation segment in the rehearsal room. She's complaining about her hip, saying she needs a cortisone shot.

"I must have hit it a little too hard last night," the Situation leers. Karina ignores him.

They goof around for the ET cameras, pretending to interview each other, and then the crew shoots them dancing. The Situation looks vulnerable, ecuting a tentative quick-step, trying as hard as he can not to blow it with people watching.

I've agreed to leave them alone once the rehearsal starts. The Situation has invited me to join him in Vegas tomorrow night; he's doing a personal appearance at the Hard Rock. I have been assured that things will be crazy, like Beatlemania crazy, and it'll be good material for my article. "You might even walk out of there with a new girlfriend," Mike Petolino told me. ("Hell, yeah," the Situation said, as if already picturing the fine ladies he will re-gift me.)

So I catch a flight, and when I land, I get an e-mail from Mike Petolino:

_We are not coming

Last minute, mike realized he didn't have the dance down and he made the call to stay and dance tonight, tomor morn and night-_

_So sry brother

He does not want to fail in this competition so he had to make the call_

I walk around the Strip for a night. Having heard that there's a Vegas line on Dancing with the Stars, I will consider finding a sports book that takes reality-TV action and placing a spiteful bet on Rick Fox, but I don't. It still seems, at the time, like a mistake to bet against the Situation.

As it turns out, it wouldn't have been. A few weeks later, the Situation shanks the Argentine tango—he basically just bench-presses Smirnoff's body while she does the lion's share of the actual dancing. He takes the judges' criticism hard—Tonioli describes his performance as "a terrible mess"—and storms off the set.

"I was upset," he tells an US Weekly reporter who corners him while he's out in the parking lot, smoking and seething. "I tried so hard. I really did. I changed my haircut; I don't know." In a pretaped interview that airs twenty-four hours later, during the results show, he declares himself "done with this" and complains that the judges are "so unpositive," both of which are probably un-good moves. That same night, he stands for elimination opposite Bristol Palin, and America votes to send him home.

Before this happens, I schedule a follow-up phone interview with the Situation. He misses the appointment. In a way, this is for the best. I spent the day with the Situation and never actually saw his abs in person, but I still had a characteristically Situationesque experience: He fucked me (over) and never called me again.

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